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Wednesday, 4 January 2017

Snotgirl, Volume 1 Review (Bryan Lee O'Malley, Leslie Hung)

Lottie Person is a twentysomething LA fashion blogger who looks beautiful and perfectly put-together on the surface but in secret her allergies turn her into a snotty mess. When she meets a new friend, something terrible happens on their night out sending Lottie into a mental and emotional spiral! I really love Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comics so it’s disappointing that his first Image book is pants. Boy howdy does this series need a story! Barely anything happens in this first volume. There’s the scene at the end of the first issue and then basically nothing again until the end of the book.

In between, we get to see dreary, irritating Lottie and her vapid friends you don’t want to spend any time with living their boring, superficial lives in LA going to parties, making snide comments about what they’re wearing, obsessing about themselves, etc. OMG, my ex-boyfriend is dating my ex-intern! Zzz… Maybe it’s an accurate depiction of how LA girls are but that doesn’t make them worth reading about.

A joke detective who’s really into his clothes gets introduced but does nothing. It’s hinted that Lottie’s new allergy pills when mixed with alcohol may be causing some of the darker, perplexing aspects of the story, which was the only interesting part of the whole thing. Otherwise her allergies don’t even play that big a part - so much for the title and premise!

The comic might’ve worked better if O’Malley had drawn it in his irreverent over-the-top manga art style to complement his exaggeratedly shallow script but Leslie Hung’s less crazy, more sincere visuals only underline how annoying the characters are and how little there is going on.

Oh well. I guess after such a remarkable run of success with the Scott Pilgrim books and Seconds Bryan Lee O’Malley had to stumble sometime. Snotgirl is snot a very good comic at all!